The Hacks

There have been some rumblings. To be honest, you could safely say that they're straight-up accusations. Some have even gone as far as to say that there's a conspiracy. There's a growing chorus of tech industry experts that are claiming the cloud is destroying open source.

To add fuel to the fire, these accusations aren't just coming from members of open source communities; they're also coming from large companies within the technology industry.

The main complaint is that large cloud providers (AWS & Azure) are making open source creators and contributors pay a subscription to use products that they've created in the first place. Basically, the cloud vendors are making tons of money on open source and the open source contributors are making very little or nothing at all.

Chunga and Tom an impartial look at these complaints and draw some parallels/comparisons to similar types of problems in other industries. Does Tom agree with the accusation that open source is being destroyed by the cloud? Listen now to find out!

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In this episode of The Hacks, Tom and Chunga are talking about the most common type of breach so far this year.

Black Hat Virtual is underway and as part of SaltStacks coverage, we are taking a new look at a report we did at the end of last year called "The State of XOps". When looking at infrastructure security, are things different than they were in 2019? The short answer is yes! Things are very different. The truth is, 2020 is considerably more dangerous. This year, Microsoft, Estee Lauder, T-Mobile and many additional organizations have all suffered security breaches caused by the same type of vulnerability. What is it?  Listen now to find out and click the link below to get your own copy of the State of Xops Report: Redux!

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The State of XOps: Redux

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As most of you already know, Tom Hatch created a very popular and widely used open source platform called "Salt". He didn't create this platform with the goal of starting a company. Tom simply created an answer to a problem that he was having.

Salt became popular very quickly and as that popularity continued to grow, he began to wonder if it was something he could use to create a business and generate income.  So, how did he do it?

Creating an open source business model is both dangerous and extremely difficult. Not many people in their right mind would try to make money by leveraging a product the people can get for free, right? Well, that's exactly what Tom did. In this episode of The Hacks, Chunga and Tom discuss the dangers and potential upside of building a business model for an open source product. Listen Now!

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Tom Hatch loves to create his own terms for different things. Chunga refers to these terms as "Hatchisms"! One of the more commonly used terms that Tom loves is "The Banana Problem".

What is the banana problem? Simply put, the banana problem is what happens when too many things are engineered to be very similar to one another. The tech/software industry has a huge banana problem! Software is omnipresent and most of it--outside of a few small variances--is very similar. It's one of the main reasons hackers are able to target companies like Microsoft, Twitter and well... everybody! Is the banana problem something that can be solved quickly or is it something that will take a long time to fix? Tom has some ideas on what can be done to deal with this issue and perhaps speed things up a bit. Listen now!

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Twitter's Massive Hack May Be Worse Than It Seems

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Tom and Chunga are excited to welcome Janae Andrus to The Hacks!

Janae is a Live Events and Field Marketing expert! As you already know, one of the biggest Covid-19 casualties in the business world has been the live event. Trade Shows, Conferences and Industry Expo's have all been either forced into the digital realm or cancelled altogether.

Business and marketing executives in all industries are now scrambling to gain an accurate perspective/opinion about Virtual Conferences in comparison with live, in-person, events. Are Virtual Conferences better because they're more convenient? Are they worth the cost of sponsorship and/or attendance? Janae answers all of these questions and many more, in this episode of The Hacks!

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The Cloud... It is quickly becoming the standard for modern business.

In this episode of The Hacks, Chunga asks Tom the question: "How much does CX (customer experience) matter when it comes to enterprise cloud technology?" After all, it's being used by everyone and yet, for some reason, customer experience doesn't really seem to exist on any widely used or universal level. Why is that?

Tom has some theories on why CX has somehow managed to fall through the cracks. Will CX ever become a "thing" for enterprise cloud technology? Listen now to find out!

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Forrester report on Enterprise Cloud CX

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Tom and Chunga are putting on their tin hats for this episode of The Hacks!

They're talking about facial recognition conspiracy theories and a recent event at the Rose Bowl where 30,000 people had their faces scanned and cataloged without their knowledge or consent.

While Tom is an expert on info-capture technology, he admits there's a lot he needs to learn when it comes to facial recognition. That said, he does know enough about it to confidently tell people they should be very concerned.  

How often is your face being scanned without your knowledge? What types of activities are you engaging in that could be impacting your life without your knowledge?  Listen now to find out!

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30,000 Unsuspecting Rose Bowl Attendees Were Scooped Up in a Facial Recognition Test

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Tom and Chunga welcome a special guest to this episode of The Hacks!

SaltStack has just announced the release of Enterprise 6.3 and Mehul Revankar is here to talk about all of the updates and the many new features that are packed into the biggest and best Enterprise release yet! Tom, Chunga and Mehul will also tell you how you can get early access.  Listen now!

For more about this episode:

Reach New Heights With Enterprise 6.3

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In this special Star Wars episode of The Hacks, Tom and Chunga debate the most catastrophic cybersecurity and IT Operations fail in the history of the Universe! The Death Star was the Empire's ultimate secret weapon--a terrifying, moon-sized, military battle station armed with a planet-destroying super laser. It was 120-kilometers (75-miles) in diameter and when fully staffed, housed approximately 2-million people... It should have been indestructible.

Who (internally) was responsible for this disaster? How was the smallest weakness exploited to create a catastrophic failure? Tom and Chunga break it down, offer their opinions and comparisons to today's tech-filled business environment!

Read Chunga's article and get your FREE Death Star Poster!

Death Star CIO Breaks His Silence

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This is the episode where Chunga gets to help everyone gaze into the spook alley that is the mind of Thomas Hatch.

The Hacks are getting philosophical and asking the question, "Why Do Programming Paradigms Matter?" Why does the language of software and it's many variances matter so much to developers and engineers? They also talk about the specifics of what a programming paradigm actually is.

For the most part, Tom believes programming paradigms are learned and viewed in a "bottom-up" type of way; which is actually backward. He's also of the opinion that this practice is limiting to innovation. 

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Read Tom's free book about "POP"!

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